Community baiting is a term that refers the activity of baiting responses within a community, often without a specific goal other then to get community members talking and interacting with your brand/company on various social networks. And is some sense, community baiting is closest to the "PR" side of social media marketing. Like traditional PR, community baiting is used to raise brand awareness, often without a direct monetary response. So, it's not about driving sales, it's about stirring the ant hill and hoping that the end result somehow indirectly improves your bottom line.
Community baiting can come in many shapes and forms. As always, it's easiest to deal with specific examples:
It's up for debate but I tend to think that social network enthusiasts most often respond to things that that meet one or many of the following requirements:
While it's impossible to catalog the exact attributes of 'successful community bait, it is easy to follow basic guidelines and of course- test, test, test. Since community interaction is easy to track, doing so methodically (that's right, track your results in a spreadsheet people!) will give you the information needed to improve your campaigns tremendously. While it's sometimes considered to be, social media marketing is not the wild west and taking a traditional PR approach (just 'guessing' at the value of public exposure) to it is plain wrong.
The advantages to incorporating community bait into your social media content plan are twofold- community engagement and community growth. Community engagement simply means that your getting your fans to interact with your brand, usually in a non-sales manner. In a sense, you're engaging in non(or less)-promotional conversation with fans. In theory, this helps build a sense of brand familiarity. Secondly, community growth occurs as your fans interact with you, and others become aware of the conversations through their own activity streams. So when Joe Fan answers your survey question, many of his friends will become aware that he has done so and they may jump in the conversation as well since Joe did first.
On the downside, community baiting can sometimes push your brand/fan relationship beyond what your fans signed-up for. That is, in many cases, you fans have decided to become fans because they know your business and expect to interact with and hear more about it. For example, I often follow (on facebook) television series (Family Guy, South Park, etc) which I like because I want to keep up-to-date on news related to these shows. Likewise, I follow local restaurants to find out when they are offering specials, new dishes, etc. Pulling from a previous examples, I don't want every TV series and restaurant that I follow trying to 'trick' me into interacting with them. Just give me what I came for, and nothing more.
Additionally, community baiting often does little to promote sales, the end goal for most businesses. While community engagement is one goal (for many) of social media marketing, it is not the only, or primary, goal. Social media is not PR, period... Balancing community building and appropriate promotions is key to maximize return on any social media campaign. We often remind clients that we're dealing with an extremely measurable marketing channel here. CAVs (calculated advertising values) and other 'questionable' metrics don't apply. Track interactions, but more importantly, track the Benjamins (that's dollar bills, people)! At the end of the day, all the likes, comments and fans in the world won't pay the bills.
Simply put, the correct application of community baiting joins together the business/brand with interactive content that fans will appreciate. Today, many brands find themselves reaching outside of these guidelines, mostly because they run out of things to say. The best advice we can give is that, if you don't have something relevant to say, say nothing at all! Don't feel as though you're neglecting or poorly-managing your community because you don't post every day. Post quality, not quantity! Most importantly, remember why your fans became fans and post content based on that reason alone.